Scalable Virtualization with Ganeti

Ganeti is an open source project which offers many solutions to simplify a clustered virtual machine environment. This session will walk through Ganeti covering its basic design goals/features, installation architecture, and production implementation.

Whether you need a simple scalable development virtual machine environment or need to deploy a large cloud production environment, you need a tool that is easy to use, deploy, and maintain. Ganeti is a clustered virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM. It is similar to libvirt in many aspects, but different in others such as its built-in cluster support using DRBD. The focus will be on a use case at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) where we were faced with scaling, performance, and reliability issues with our existing VM infrastructure. I’ll cover the overall design and features of Ganeti along with the basics of installing it. Additionally I’ll walk through some of the basic operations you may encounter (deployment, failover, expansion, hardware failures, etc). I'll also cover some tools that we are using to help manage our clusters.